Time for a ‘Debate’ on Nuclear Power–Involving Mainly Boosters

Will the unfolding crisis in Japan lead to a debate over the safety of nuclear power in the United States? Initial signs are not encouraging.

NBC‘s Meet the Press(3/13/11)had an interview with Marvin Fertel of the Nuclear Energy Institute.Host Chuck Todd prefaced one question with, “Iunderstand that you represent the industry’s interests in this….”

Later on the show, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) was asked to weigh in–since he had been speaking out in favor of nuclear power, a position he doesn’t appear to be abandoning:

Well, we’re going to have to see what happens here. Obviously, it’s still, still things are happening. But the bottom line is, we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil…. So I’m still willing to look at nuclear. As I’ve always said, it has to be done safely and carefully.

On the CBS program Face The Nation, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I.-Ct.) was on to say:

I’ve been a big supporter of nuclear power because it’s domestic. It’s ours and it’s clean. And we’ve had a good safety safety with nuclear power plants here in the United States. But I think we’ve got to–I don’t want to stop the building of nuclear power plants, but I think we’ve got to kind of quietly–quickly put the brakes on until we can absorb what has happened in Japan.

ABC‘s This Week, to its credit, had Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund. He also appeared on Fox News Sunday–which featured pro-nuke Sen. Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) rightafterward.

In the New York Times today (3/14/11)we see the headline “U.S. Nuclear Industry Faces New Uncertainty.” But the article only quotes proponents of nuclear power. The lead graph:

The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America’s energy and global warming challenges may have evaporated as quickly as confidence in Japan’s crippled nuclear reactors.

So we hear from a member of that “fragile” consensus (which never included “mainstream environmental groups,” as the article claimed). Is the Times planning on running a separate piece detailing the concerns of critics of the nuclear power industry?

The Washington Post has a similar Reuters piece (3/14/11) headlined, “Some Nervously Eye U.S. Nuclear Plants.” The lead sentence:

Anxiety over Japan’s quake-crippled nuclear reactors has triggered calls from U.S. lawmakers and activists for a review of U.S. energy policy and for brakes on expansion of domestic nuclear power.

But the only quotes come from nuke boosters: Joe Lieberman, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute and a White House spokesperson. If there really is “anxiety” and calls from “activists,”readers shouldhear them.

Activism Director and and Co-producer of CounterSpinPeter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra! and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Hart has been interviewed by a number of media outlets, including NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the Associated Press. He has also appeared on Showtime and in the movie Outfoxed. Follow Peter on Twitter at @peterfhart.

Nuclear power can be made safe; but not in the present context.
If it were to be made completely safe, it would be less economical than it already is.
Most bad acts are not done by bad people, but by weak people acting out of expediency.

First, most nuclear power plants in the U.S. are very old (many of them beyond their original design life). The owners have been very successful in obtaining life extensions from pliable, obsequious regulators.
Second, because nuclear plants have low variable cost of production (see below), their owners are pushing them to produce more power than they were designed for.
Third, because of the failings of human nature, there are always the usual cases of deferred maintenance, benign neglect, poor security etc..

Nuke plants are not very forgiving–even small mistakes have big consequences.
Waste products of nuclear fission include Strontium-90, Cesium-137, Iodine-133, and Polonium 210.
These are all chemically and radiologically toxic, and some of them have long half-lives (300 years for Cesium-137).
The human metabolism will readily take them up instead of iodine (which is why potassium iodide can partially immunize against nuclear fallout, because it saturates the metabolism with iodine, especially in children and nursing mothers).

But the worst threat is not the working reactors, but the high-level spent fuel that is stored at the power plants.
This stuff is still VERY HOT, just not hot enough to make the amount of power that utility execs desire.
At the onset of the nuclear power boom, the Federal government agreed to reprocess or dispose of all the spent fuel.
But the pols haven’t been able to get it right–now the gov can neither reprocess nor dispose of the high-level waste.
Electric utilities are suing the feds for breach of contract–and winning.
Existing reprocessing capability is logjammed with Russian bomb-grade material (90% instead of 3% enriched).

Spent nuclear fuel is a high-maintenance problem.
Only the French have any significant capacity to reprocess spent fuel from civilian nuclear programs.
WE, on the other hand, store spent fuel in ponds located for the most part at the sites where the waste was generated.
Most of it is trapped there because:
(a) there’s no other place to put it,
(b) there’s nothing else that can be done with it in the present context, and
(c) even if there was someone who would take it, it’s not legal to transport it in most states & municipalities.
These spent fuel ponds are in flimsy buildings without containment vessels and often have minimal seismic protection and security.
They can still re-attain critical mass if they get hot enough, and generate meltdowns or even weak nuclear explosions, both of which would certainly result in “dirty bomb” type consequences.
The most serious problems at Fukushima are from the 2 or 3 (depending on who you listen to) waste pools that are now on fire.
It’s like a homeowner storing all his laundry in the basement and dirty kitchen utensils in the sink–for the life of the house!

The media are saying things like “Who could have foreseen that the tsunami would take out the (unhardened) APUs or their diesel fuel tanks for the cooling pumps for the waste ponds?”.
Don’t you think terrorists and wackos know that?
Even the waste ponds themselves are vulnerable.

Successful implementation of the nuclear fuel cycle requires a political consensus that can endure for 30-50 years or more.
It requires government subsidies (direct and loan guarantees) and undertakings that are unlikely to be met (like waste handling).
It requires a VERY LARGE capital investment at the front and back end of a plant life cycle.

On top of all that, nuclear rent-seeking-toads continue to promote global-warming hysteria, to try to further secure their tenuous market franchise at the expense of cheaper and less apocalyptic fossil fuels.

The sooner the nukes go away, the better off everyone is.
IT’S ABOUT THE WASTE, STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No reprocessing–no nuclear industry.

There is no doubt that the situation in Fukushima is incredibly serious and could become catastrophic, but the coverage I have seen here in Canada has been the opposite of what you describe: mostly concerns that are based, when you listen to the concerned people, on very little knowledge.

I am a card-carrying leftie and certified tree-hugger, but I also happen to have scientific training (Ph.D., Caltech) and I feel comfortable sorting out statements that are based on reality from those that are not. I am happy to say that I have heard some anti-nuclear activists providing credible analysis, but for the most part the “activists” you encourage are expressing “anxiety” and nothing more. Since I have an interest in science, I have been following this issue closely, and here at least, the coverage has been exactly the opposite of what you describe.

I guess all those uncovered fuel rods burning up isn’t much to worry about. The plutonium going into the air and ocean is no big deal. Just a lot of irrational nukaphobia, like the silly villagers with pitchforks and torches at Dr. Frankenstein’s gate. Uninformed masses.
I am glad that we have certified tree-huggers to assure us that all is good and nuclear power is a panacea. Too cheap to be metered! Cheapness RULES!!!
That’s the great thing about science: we can fix anything we screw up. See “Sorceror’s Apprentice”.
Stop worrying and learn to love it. The experts are in charge.

3. They still don’t know what to do with the waste. (not in my back yard)

4. They cannot or will not be built by free market investors. That is why they have to
resort to Government loans that will always be increased after the inevitable
cost overruns, since they ALWAYS underestimate the cost of construction.

5. Private insurance companies refuse to insure Nuclear power plants, so the
government past the the Price-Anderson Act to create an insurance pool
from funds collected by the government from the various power plants.
In other words, it is socialized insurance for the power companies.

Amazingly, not everything is covered. For example: “Price-Anderson does not require coverage for spent fuel or nuclear waste stored at interim storage facilities, transportation of nuclear fuel or waste that is not either to or from a nuclear reactor, or acts of theft or sabotage occurring after planned transportation has ended.”

THe following article and video adds more information from someone who actually worked on building a nuclear power plant.

January 3, 2011
Areva in Ratnagiri!

Do you know you can never completely dismantle a nuclear power plant? Ever. Is it then any surprise that the country which pioneered nuclear technology and nuclear power plants, have not built one in the last 25 years?

A French company, Areva, however is building the world’s largest nuclear power plant, that too based on technology that has not been completely tested, in the pristine, beautiful coastline of Ratnagiri (Jaitapur Town), India.

In these videos (see http://designandpeople.blogspot.com/2011/01/areva-in-ratnagiri.html), Rada Krishna, who was the construction manager in building the last and the largest nuclear reactor of the US in San Onofre, California goes beyond the known clichés for and against the same, to talks about issues rarely, if at all, talked about. He busts many myths surrounding the construction, working, dismantling and the zillion hazards — economic, social, environmental and political – of a nuclear power plant.

The revelations and repercussions for India are chilling.

ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ¢ Once a nuclear plant is built it cannot be completely shut down and has to be maintained for perpetuity costing multiple times over the cost of building one proving that Nuclear energy is definitely not cheap.

ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ¢ Today we don’t need missiles to sabotage a Nuclear power plant and a computer hacker sitting in some nondescript corner of the world can do a much better job of sabotage and perhaps destruction of a nuclear power plant as the Stuxnet virus that has delayed the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in Russia and threatens to do the same to Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz show.

ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ¢ Half life of the uranium in the reactor is over 24,000 years i.e. its danger is reduced to only half in that time and they have to be kept for an eternity, literally, before the spent fuel (the used Uranium from reactors) for it to become safe completely.

ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ¢ The proposed Jaitapur Nuclear Power Plant in Ratnagiri district of India, with 6 reactors, is an act bordering on lunacy because even if there is damage to one, all six will have to be closed which besides causing irreparable damage to ecology and the entire region, will lead to a lost of billions of dollars of taxpayers money. It is perhaps best that India does not do something that will go down as one of the greatest blunders in its history.

The question to ask thus is why would any nation consciously build a Damocles sword to hang over its own necks perennially? What is the stupidity and illusion that pervades all our consciousness that forces us into illusions about nuclear power plants? Isn’t it more sensible to go for other, safer options that are indeed available?

In the light of these facts, isn’t building a power plant today, akin not just to shooting oneself up but actually blowing ourselves up with our families and friends? Can human civilization survive even one single nuclear power plant, let alone many? You decide.

About Rada Krishna:

Rada Krishna, is a retired construction specialist, who is responsible for building many power plants in the United States of America. He began by working with the Tatas in India then shifted base to the US where he was involved with building various types of power plants from those that operate on oil and gas, to building the first solar plants with reflecting mirrors and the first geothermal power plants in the US. His most important job was as the senior construction manager in the SAN ONOFRE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT IN CALIFORNIA in the early 80s (units 2 and 3), which has the largest nuclear reactors in the US. That was also the last nuclear power plant built in the US, the country that pioneered it in the first place. Incidentally he was also involved in the planning of dismantling a power plant.

Gratitude is due to Vivek Sundara for his help in the production of this video. (Contributor: Satyan K Bordolai)

Right now, we’re seeing funding pulled for the very successful and hard won programs that brought back our clean air and water. For the past decade, the government agencies that oversee public health and safety in all sectors have been dismally underfunded. Now there are powerful interests seeking to de-fund them altogether. Regulation is a dirty word in the House of Representatives. And so, to many, is science. Now try to imagine expanding nuclear power in this scenario. The problems of disposing fuel rod waste are nothing to the problems of decaying reactors. The plants run their course in few decades, and then? What are doing with the ones we already have?

I too am on the radical left side of the political spectrum, a democratic socialist to boot. I think there is irrational hysteria coming from anti-nuclear proponents, governed largely by ignorant fear and/or distrust of government and/or the nuclear industry. (Some don’t favor nuclear energy because of economics, an arguable position.) For example, the statement in the response above (Miner49er) that the fuel rods in storage can go critical. Or that polonium is a waste product of fission. Etc. Where does this bad “information” come from?

The anti-nuclear gang have discovered a propaganda bonanza in Japan’s misfortune. Sad.

Acknowledgement: I’m a retired nuclear physicist. I suppose that means that I’m not qualified to judge the pros and cons of nuclear power for society’s energy needs.

Hey MKB: If you are such a bad “Nuclear Physicist”, where is your “scientific” explanation? All I see is labeling of other people. Actually , you sound like a right-wing PLANT! And all you can agree with are the FINANCIAL REASONS?????? Go blow smoke somewhere else!

If we git rid of all the subsidies to nuclear power (as well as those to fossil fuel) and spent it on photovoltaic s and start reducing population to what the planet can tolerate, we wouldn’t be having this debate. I was raised a conservative but without changing my position I now find myself a liberal.

How can anyone be a conservative and not be a conservationist?

I live off grid with a photovoltaic system that’s cheaper and more dependable than grid power and I live as well as most except for the banksters and robber barons with their neon water fountain power guzzling lifestyles. I’m damn well tired of paying more taxes than the filthy rich Friedmaniac deregulating wall street fraudsters and their paid shills in congress while my wages have been stagnant for the last 30 years. Isn’t it ironic that the only solutions we can think of all enrich the military industrial complex?

Nuclear power is too expensive, too dangerous and unnecessary for our energy needs. As we have seen, “atoms for peace” have turned into atomic bombs. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima, how many more accidents must we endure before we stop nuclear power once and for all. No one wants the waste, there is not permanent solution to the waste, it is too capital intensive to build and run safely and with conservation and renewable energy, we can become energy independent, with renewable energy resources that employ Americans in this country, decentralize our energy grid and make us less vulnerable to terrorist attack, independent from foreign oil and natural gas and less dependent on oil, coal and centralized electric utilities who care only about themselves and there stockholders, not the planet or their rate payers. We have the technology to achieve this. Just talk to Amory Lovins’ at the Rocky Mountain Institute. But do we have the political will and economic means to fight the big energy companies who own our Federal, State and local governments?

I don\’t know if you have seen that we Australian\’s are having a debate over a carbon tax which the Australian Labor party ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€¦“left windÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ wants to introduce. Now the Liberal party of Australia ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€¦“right wing conservativesÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ are kicking up a fuss about it and they want to implement nuclear power stations as a form to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

To go that way here will be an extreme waste of money and time/labour, even though we have the uranium for free basically. But what people seem to ignore is what the main argument about nuclear fission reactors are. That is IF something goes wrong it could become a catastrophe as in radiation poisoning, but if we did not have it in the first place, then there will be no radiation poisoning.

It is the cause and effect principle that applies here!

We as a species should be turning our research and efforts to fusion power and to eliminate the whole process of waste the current systems have. Also some like the idea of Thorium.

But what is certain is that if we implement cheap clean unlimited energy sources, how will the ruling classes maintain their hold on the human race, just as your currency the green back is values by oil and my currency is valued by iron ore and coal.

I am an environmentalist but also consider myself a realist. This notion that we can scale up wind and solar to power levels that are needed is ridiculous. These are supplemental power sources at best. How does the anti-nuclear activist reconcile this stance with global warming, something Im far more concerned about. We need to reduce carbon and emissions and quit deforesting the planet. Nuclear power, despite this recent problem is the cleanest of all power sources, yet we still have Americans living with China Syndrome mentality.

We have just experienced a level 9 earthquake and tsunami damaging a 40 year old plant with a marginal safety record. We need to learn from it and move on. The sky isnt falling and this isnt Chernobyl. More people die daily from car accidents and gun violence than nuclear plant accidents have caused in the last 40 years. Before criticizing a rationale approach to nuclear power, it would be wise for the left side of the political aisle to come up with reasonable alternative proposals instead of hysterical hyperbole.

Mostly good comments. Nuclear power is still in it’s infancy as to how to best site and qualify them.
Yes they are costly and slow in building, but do have the only advantage that they do not signifantly hurt the environment when the bugs are removed. I have been invovolved significantly with various nuclear activities and my opinion is that if coal and LP gas were “discovered” today they would be too dangerous.
Think about it and don’t be snookered by the ” Energy Industry”.

Just as we cant do without oil at present time, we cant do without nuclear.So option one- and the only option is to make it safer. Many redundancy systems. Gavity fed pools…..More people have died in windmill accidents than nuclear.We must go on

Nuclear power has never been safe or clean. The body of information that deals with ‘acceptable risk’ for example does not include ‘risk-free-from-negative-effects-for-the-public’ but mainly concerns itself with ‘risk of return on investment.’ Google it, if you don’t believe me.

Clean Energy cannot be defined as something that includes

1) Huge amounts of radioactive toxic waste for which there is no clean solution (studies on how to communicate the location of radioactive waste dumps to future civilizations have proved unsolvable. Google it.)

2) Massive water use: Can clean energy include using a huge percent (about 30% for France) of a country’s fresh water resources just to keep them cool?

3) Heated water about 25 degrees hotter pumped back into the rivers and streams badly damage ecosystems. Think the heated water pumped out of the plants isn’t radioactive?, and

4) constant low-level radiation. Dude, Russia bans household microwave ovens for their radiation exposure: studies in Italy have ‘exposed’ the myth long ago that radiation from household microwave ovens are toxic. Google it. Would you live near a Nuc Plant? I hope not.

JC, I googled your first criterion and it worked out exactly opposite from what you suggested.

I started with nuclear power acceptable risk.

I added -Fischhoff because 1. it is from 1983 and 2. it brought back many hits. However, the document is talking about health risk.

I then added “answers.com” because answers.com gives this “answer”: “Many people think so, but some don’t. Designers produce analysis of possible faults showing very low probabilities of release of activity. Unfortunately experience gives incidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.”

Then, just to eliminate answers that weren’t relevant to nuclear power or acceptable risk (damns, for instance), I ended with:

+”nuclear power” +”acceptable risk” -Fischhoff -“answers.com”

The hits were overwhelmingly about health risks to humans. Actually, with 100 hits on a page, I didn’t get to a second page, but even the pro-nuclear docs I saw were all about health, not money.

But may I focus your attention on the final line: factor b describing the benefit, which can also be described as the “positive effect” functional — which seems to take precedence in the Nuclear Power question.

…after the opening discussion of health risks, then comes the meat:
“Developing quantitative measures of risk and norms for amount of risk in the use of nuclear power which are economically acceptable is the most important task in controlling the quality of design, the siting, construction and operation.”

[that is, that it invariably boils down to an economic issue: Can the investor survive the economic costs of the health risks posed on others?]

Further down: “The usage of nuclear power sources within the framework of power requirements is oriented towards guaranteeing the planned growth of national revenue. Consequently, the procedure of setting norms for acceptable risk should be based on the “positive effect” functional, which is the quantitative measure of the contribution of each nuclear power source to the national revenue.”

[This “positive effect” functional quite explicitly distances the result from life-health risks assessments and, in my opinion, is precisely the danger of the logical model.]

“Modern technological systems are usually introduced because they provide some benefit to society. But they also pose risks. These risks are usually accepted as the price we have to pay for the benefit the technology offers us, provided the risk is less than the benefit. If the risk is too high, the technology will be rejected.

“Measures can be taken to reduce the risk that a technology poses. This will usually decrease the positive effects somewhat, for example by making the whole technology more expensive. But if the risk can be reduced far enough, people may be willing to accept it as the price they have to pay for the benefit the technology provides.”

[In conclusion — after mathematical discussions of principles of assessing health risk — it’s pointed out…]
“The ALARP and GAMAB principles both assume that one already knows an acceptable risk level. They don’t enable you to determine one from scratch. The usual philosophy has been to assume that what we have today can be regarded as acceptable, so that’s where we start.”

[Comment: Which for me is the problem-start point. Then it continues:]

“At least in Europe, the discussion around nuclear power has shown that this is not the best way to go. Numerically, the residual risk of a nuclear power station may be much lower than the risk of motor traffic, but people are still more skeptical towards nuclear power. So if the starting point for ALARP or GAMAB is controversial, then the results will be equally controversial.”

I’ll try to find my other Google links. While my effort to communicate my opinion is rough, I believe the position is sound.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36758803/Spotlight-397-Costs-of-Nuclear-vs-Solar-It-s-No-Contest Reviews a report by NC WARN and find some of what they did lacking. Especially in the are of no subsidies for Nuclear verse subsidies for solar. Their conclusion that the costs of solar are still to high when compared to nuclear. However at the end of it they do briefly mention that there are other factors they did not list. Which has been spoken of here including the health costs. Just ask Dr. Helen Caldicott on that.

I fully agree with Miner49er’s first comment. With 7 billion people on earth, if we want peace, we need energy (much more than we are producing today), but we do not need commercial lobbies, ready to sacrifice security to make money. Governments should begin to defend the interests of their people, instead of those of some industry lobbyists.